Marble and Dominoes
by AnxietyIsFreedom
Summary: Fix-it or kind-of-missing-scene written around the Barriere du Maine incident. In which Grantaire succeeds in his mission, in his own way. Book text, in italics, is from the Hapgood translation.


_One o'clock was striking from the Vaugirard steeple when Enjolras reached the Richefeu smoking-room. He pushed open the door, entered, folded his arms, letting the door fall to and strike his shoulders, and gazed at that room filled with tables, men, and smoke._

_A voice broke forth from the mist of smoke, interrupted by another voice. It was Grantaire holding a dialogue with an adversary._

_Grantaire was sitting opposite another figure, at a marble Saint-Anne table, strewn with grains of bran and dotted with dominos. He was hammering the table with his fist, and this is what Enjolras heard:-_

_"Double-six."_

_"Fours."_

Grantaire sits with his back to the doorway, wreathed in tobacco-smoke so thick it almost obscures the space between him and the other three men in the game. His eyes are fixed on the tiles scattered across the surface of the table.

The man sitting opposite Grantaire, scowling around his pipe with his fixed glare also studying the tiles, has claimed he doesn't understand politics. He does understand dominoes, however, and it is for this reason that Grantaire has decided to attempt Enjolras' mission in his own manner – disregarding all the moments in his past when thinking he has known best, trusting his own instincts, has led him only to disaster. He has granted this important task its due consideration, and this is the conclusion he has reached. What is needed for the job in hand, as all marble-workers would agree, are tools of both blunt power and sharp precision.

In this particular place, at this particular time, Grantaire knows, he could have chosen to rant for hours on the subjects of Robespierre and Danton and Saint-Just, or he could have embarrassed himself completely by attempting some elaborate and earnest plea for solidarity among the people, and both would have gone over equally badly. A man who is attempting, in the sacred hour between one shift in the studio or the quarry and the next, to enjoy a game of dominoes over lunch, is not a man who will take kindly to being suddenly and volubly interrupted by some bourgeois revolutionary who does not work allotted hours and who has taken it upon himself to launch into a speech from the neighbouring table, which might more providentially be occupied by either drink or dominoes. Even Enjolras himself would not have gained a greatly sympathetic reception from the top of a table, however appetising he might manage to look. As for the disarray into which Marius would have distractedly stumbled had Enjolras dispatched him here instead, Grantaire shudders to think.

He has not scored well in this round, and in exasperation brings his hand down hard on the table again. The marble of its surface is stained unspeakably and crumbling at the corners, and would be, he thinks, as unworthy of supporting Enjolras as he has been himself. Grantaire drains his glass but keeps a calculating eye on his opponents, his fellows, his potential brothers in arms.

_"Four points."_

_"Not much."_

_"It's your turn."_

_"I have made an enormous mistake."_

"Of course," Grantaire is saying with some effort, opening a third bottle and trying to focus his gaze, "having made some gains, some headway, in one round of dominoes – or one round of insurrection – do you then risk all you have in attempting to win the next round, and let your confidence dictate your actions, rather than your reason? Or do you hold back, and make concessions, and keep something in reserve? It just won't do to gamble everything you have on one rebellion, one round, one rising. You must hold something in reserve, you must survey the state of play – you understand this, and this is the sort of thinking revolutionaries employ all the time – and so, you see, the strategy required to win at dominoes, or cards, hardly differs significantly from the strategies required to win at revolution!"

He looks up, in drunken triumph. The men around the table are regarding him with varying levels of amusement, impatience, and second-hand embarrassment. No one responds, and Grantaire, wincing into his wine, decides to change his own strategy sharply.

_"It was your play, I believe?"_

_"Yes."_

_"Blank."_

The game is heading towards its conclusion, and Grantaire has done, if not his best, then the best that can be expected of an artist such as he working with such particular and unpromising material as this. Grantaire is only too aware that revolution is nothing like a game, but he is also aware for the purpose of this task of how seriously these men take their gambling, their games of chance, on which they spend as significant a proportion of their day as does the Friends of the ABC on mapping the country's transition to the new world. At any rate, having abandoned his metaphors of risk, investment and calculation in revolution as in dominoes, and chosen to pursue another tack entirely, he must now trust to luck.

This is perhaps the only sort of occasion on which he feels Enjolras should defer to someone more familiar with the gutter than his firmament of insurrectionary stars, not that he will ever tell him so. He recalls his parting shot, remembers stepping closer to Enjolras than he had previously ever dared, and, in anticipation of his own success, telling him in a hushed, caressing voice not to worry, to be easy, to trust in him. For a moment he imagines himself as an unworthy Icarus, close to the sun but with the wax of his wings not yet melting, and he flushes, hot beneath his cravat and the unfamiliar weight of his Robespierre waistcoat.

_"What luck he has! Ah! You are lucky! Two."_

_"One."_

_"Neither five nor one. That's bad for you."_

_"Domino."_

_"Plague take it!"_

Behind Grantaire, the door falls heavily closed as Enjolras takes his leave, unspeaking and unseen.

Leaning back in the chair, Grantaire lets his final domino fall to the table with a nonchalant air, as though he has not even noticed winning the game. He looks across at the men around the table, who look back with bad grace but with a certain resignation and, perhaps, some curiosity.

"So you'll come along tomorrow evening, then, you'll give it a go?" Grantaire asks, in a voice that sounds, to him, surprisingly sober.

The men nod, and Grantaire flashes them a grin. The game has been played not for cash, or with bargaining chips, but on condition that, should Grantaire win as he has done, his opponents will come to hear Enjolras speak tomorrow. Grantaire has absolute faith in Enjolras' ability to win them round from there.

Looking down at the table while taking a final drink, he thinks about seeing Enjolras' face tomorrow, pictures his smile like a crack in marble.


End file.
